CPI Scotland: exam structure and preparation

About CPI Scotland

CPI Scotland is the IPA's Certificate of Proficiency in Insolvency for Scottish law and practice. Like its England and Wales counterpart it covers corporate and personal insolvency, but personal insolvency in Scotland runs under its own statute and institutions, and Scottish corporate procedures have their own rules and terminology. It is a separate exam, not a version of the English one with different names.

If you are still choosing between papers, read CPI vs CPPI first.

Exam at a glance

The IPA's CPI page links the 2026 Scotland syllabus, which sets out one three-hour paper worth 100 marks. Part A has ten one-mark multiple-choice questions and Part B ten short-form questions worth two or four marks. Parts C and D have 15-mark computational or essay-style questions: two compulsory, then two chosen from three. Regulation, ethics, SIPs and other guidance account for about 20% of the marks, and the law examined is the law in force on 1 January of the exam year.

The exam is online and closed book, sat on your own computer with remote invigilation. The IPA's exam pages list one sitting a year for this paper, in June.

What does CPI Scotland test?

On the personal side: sequestration, protected trust deeds and the Debt Arrangement Scheme, with the roles of the interim trustee, the trustee, commissioners and the Accountant in Bankruptcy, and non-statutory options such as debt management plans, Mortgage to Rent and Mortgage to Shared Equity.

On the corporate side: administration (including pre-pack sales, SIP 16 and the connected persons regulations), receivership, members' and creditors' voluntary liquidation, court liquidation and company voluntary arrangements. The syllabus lists the Insolvency Act 1986 alongside Scottish rules for receivership, winding up, CVAs and administration, the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016 and the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Act 2023. Office holders file with both Companies House and the Accountant in Bankruptcy.

What makes CPI Scotland challenging?

Much of the vocabulary is shared with England and Wales and much of the law is not. Creditors give mandates rather than proxies; office holders challenge "challengeable transactions" rather than "antecedent transactions"; a sequestration has an interim trustee and the Accountant in Bankruptcy where an English bankruptcy has the Official Receiver. Using English terms is a sign to the examiner that an answer has been built on the wrong framework.

If any of your study materials were written for England and Wales, the trap is easy to fall into. Check where every note came from.

A jurisdiction-check exercise

Take a practice question about a Scottish debtor and a draft answer written partly from an English textbook. Before correcting the wording, list the assumptions that travelled with the English material: who can apply, who acts, what happens to the debtor's assets and income, and which steps follow. Then rewrite the answer from the Scottish sources alone.

Do the same for a corporate answer, checking the office holders, documents, filing destinations and stages. Add "wrong jurisdiction" as its own category in your error log, so that it triggers a source check rather than another round of general revision.